“Street Talk”: Pamphlet Literature of the Nigerian Marketplace, now on view at Hanke Gallery (in Yale’s Sterling Library), collates “voices of an emerging nation as it welcomed independence from colonial rule,” curator Thobile Ndimande writes. It does this primarily with books and booklets from Yale’s world-class collection of Onitsha Market Literature—“indigenous Nigerian folktales, political commentaries, academic treatments, everyday advice, and new literary experiments,” which were, for the midcentury commonfolk they attracted amid bustling open-air markets, “intended… to be both educating and entertaining.”
Ndimande’s intentions toward her audience are in essence the same, as she offers us a chance to discover and connect with the pamphlets’ long-ago, faraway authors—“the messengers, schoolboys, taxi drivers, sign painters, guitar players, and farmers” for whom “standardized English [was] as new as it was to their Elizabethan counterparts,” yielding works written in “demotic, uncooked, Mad English.”
Those last quotes are snipped from a latter-day, Western-facing OML anthology included in the exhibit. As a humble ode to said “Mad”ness, here are some more of the show’s textual fragments, each replanted from a different OML pamphlet into an associative poem:
Tears streamed from his eyes but no sound came from his lips
the depth of our culture, the antiquity of our origin, our rise and decline, our shame and pride
THERE IS A NEW POISON IN AFRICA TODAY!
the pestering nuisance produced by some beettles
Southern Provinces divided into Eastern and Western Provinces
She must do everything, to retain her charm and loveliness. At all times she must be a decoration
He felt a terrible appeal coming to him from her
Anyway, greatest preachers are not necessarily the holiest
And if you can make out bits of narrative even here, imagine what’ll happen should you visit the exhibit.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
